The News
Former US President Donald Trump’s campaign was left scrambling to reorient for a likely Kamala Harris run after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid Sunday.
In public, architects of the Trump campaign have insisted that a Harris candidacy poses little threat: “Our organization is built for our candidate, not our opposition… The other side now has to shove a new candidate into an organization built for some else,” the Trump campaign’s political director wrote on X.
But campaign advisers are believed to have wanted Biden to stay in the race, and previously discussed holding back attack ads about his age and mental acuity in the hopes it would reduce the likelihood of him stepping aside, The Guardian reported.
SIGNALS
Trump can no longer bank on running against a ‘zombie campaign’
Trump’s confidantes believed Biden was holding back the Democrats, so his sudden exit from the presidential race saw them go from “cocky” to “fearful” to “stunned,” Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic. The Trump campaign has already stepped up its attacks on Harris by accusing her of enabling Biden’s record on inflation, illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos, but “policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans…. [and Harris] does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden” — his age, Alberta added. “Donald Trump will not run against a zombie campaign the rest of the way,” the editor of The Bulwark argued. “He will be challenged by someone young, scrappy, and hungry.”
Republicans call on Biden to resign immediately
Congressional Republicans appear to have launched a “coordinated effort” to push for Biden’s immediate resignation from the presidency, arguing that he isn’t fit to finish his term, Politico reported. But outside experts have claimed that running for president and actually being president require different skills: “Biden’s decision to end his candidacy relates to carrying out his duties over the next four and [a] half years… From an aging and health perspective, that is different to his fitness to serve today through the end of his current term,” an aging specialist told The Washington Post. Meanwhile, some Democratic allies have privately suggested that Harris taking the presidency now could confer “additional political benefits,” the outlet reported.
The Republicans’ shifting attack lines
Some Republicans have sought to paint Biden’s move as antidemocratic, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accusing the Democrats of “trying to upend the expressed will of the American people in primary elections across the country.” This is a “clear faux-concern” designed to mock the Democrats’ line that a Trump reelection would be disastrous for democracy, Slate wrote, though it does echo the argument Biden himself made just a few weeks ago, a columnist noted in Vox. However, Biden stepping down should be seen as “democratic in intention,” he argued, since the American public overwhelmingly thought he was too old to serve another term, and primary voters had limited information when they cast their votes.